On 18 May 2017 at 07:33, Michal Kubecek <mkubecek@suse.cz> wrote:
On Wednesday, 17 May 2017 15:18 Mathias Homann wrote:
...have we at any time in the past ever had a situation where there was only ONE version of openSUSE officially supported?
I mean, Leap 42.3 is not out yet...
Current situation is quite different from what we had earlier. In the old model, each new version was really new, forked fresh from Factory, so that there was in actually no real "major" and "minor" version. As new versions came each 6 or 8 months (more or less), noone could blame users who did not want to do a full upgrade to new codebase so often. That's why there was an overlap between [n] and [n+2], so that you could skip e.g. 12.2 and upgrade directly from 12.1 to 12.3 without losing support at any moment.
With Leap 42.x, core packages (mostly) follow SLE ones where the policy is that upgrading in a new service pack should be well reasoned, not just "hey, there is a new upstream version". And this logic should apply to most of the distribution - or at least that is the plan. There are exceptions, of course, as some packages do not fit into this model well and some maintainers do not agree with this policy, but in general, Leap 42.x and 42.(x+1) should be much closer to each other than e.g. 12.1 and 12.2. Therefore users should fear upgrading to next point release less and it should make much less sense to skip 42.2 and upgrade 42.1 systems directly to 42.3.
What is a different story, though, is moving to new major version with completely new codebase. IMHO we should think very carefully about the overlap of lifetimes of last 42.x and 43.0/15.0/whatever it is called. IMHO it would make good sense to have longer overlap (12 months?) between those.
Release Dates of SLE/Leap 15 are not yet final, so this is an educated estimate based on the information I have available to me, but we're currently looking at a situation where there should be a minimum of 9 months between the release of Leap 15 and the end of life of 42.3. There is a possibility that the overlap could be extended beyond that. We'll see. I'm involved in conversations on the topic but I wouldn't expect any news in this area quickly, as there are lots of moving parts involved. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org